Deadpool VR review: foulmouthed, skilfully paced mayhem

If in doubt, kick off with a hell-for-leather chase scene! This is how the Deadpool VR game begins—the player in a car hurtling through picturesque scenery with bad guys, bullets, and explosions popping all around us. Because somebody else is driving, we’re all guns a-blazing, brandishing the signature dual pistols of the “merc with a mouth”—and, soon enough, his equally signature katanas, which are with us throughout the game’s roughly 10 hour runtime.

After taking down a seemingly endless horde of whack-a-mole villains, we lose our head in a very literal way: it’s severed from our body and flies through the air. We can look back on the remainder of our physique, blood oozing from it, in the first of several moments that toy with corporeality and presence in fun ways. As the critic Marie-Laure Ryan put it: “in VR, as in RL, all action passes through the body.” Deadpool’s developers seem to have read that—and doodled in the margins.

The next immersion features a monologuing bad guy called The Flag-Smasher, who relays narratively significant information. To prevent the player from walking away from such an exposition-delivering character, developers often deploy the lazy, cut scene-ish approach of freezing the player in place. This achieves their objectives but breaks immersion—reminding us that we’re participating in a manufactured experience—and makes no sense: we have legs but, all of sudden, we can’t walk.

In this scene, however, we’re still just a head—thus immobile for an excellent reason. It’s a quirky, thoroughly Deadpoolian flourish, absurd and self-aware but also good game design—using a narrative development to justify a limitation. This is the first (but not the last) fleck of innovation in a very pleasurable FPS, conferred with an understanding that a production like this can be many things—scatty, illogical, juvenile, etcetera—but it should never be boring.

The devs sustain the pace partly by pelting us with jokes via the protagonist’s near-constant commentary. The sheer volume of quips ensures some will land, raising a smirk or a giggle. Given the young-skewing target demographic, I found the number of 90s pop culture references a little odd, but hey: I enjoyed them and they make sense given the character’s age.

The story is lean and bits-and-piecey, with Deadpool strong-armed by a rotund, egomaniacal alien TV producer into abducting various warriors, from across the multiverse, for a blood-soaked tournament called “Mojo World.” Deadpool agrees to do this while trapped behind translucent green bars in a cage-like space—another narratively justified constraint, jokingly described by the protagonist as a “shitty force-the-player-to-listen to exposition bubble.”

Meta-textual comments are strewn throughout, playfully acknowledging the developers’ decisions. But some of the best go unmentioned. For instance small touches that make a big difference, like special weapons (i.e. throwing daggers) that briefly hover in the air after a baddie dies. Their limited availability encourages us to snap ‘em up, which feels satisfying, and is another strategy to sustain that zippy pace.

The fighting mechanics are fluid and fun, keeping us entertained through conventional elements a la boss battles, which abide by a familiar turn-based system but never feel onerous. The game also knack for, every once in a while, throwing up something unexpected, some wild explosion of colour and bling. This includes, several hours in, a berserk motorcycle ride through hell involving an extended surprise cameo from a major Marvel character.

This section is so wildly entertaining—even more so than that initial car chase—I hope it’s made accessible via chapter selection once the game’s completed (at the time of writing this review, I’m about eight hours in). It distills the game’s ethos: that momentum is everything; the only unforgivable sin in the Deadpool universe is slowing down too much. This well-crafted game doesn’t reinvent the wheel but does a fine job sustaining a zippy pace.